Twin Ambitions - My Autobiography

by Mo Farah

  It’s very nearly not enough. On the morning of 8 August I limber onto the track feeling tired and drained. Despite putting everything into my recovery, that 10,000 metres race has taken a lot out of me. Somehow I’ve got to make it through this heat and hope I can recover a bit more ahead of the final. I tell myself, ‘Just get the job done. Because if you don’t make it through qualifying, you have no final.’ There’s no way I am going to suffer a repeat of Beijing. Today, this heat is my final.

  I struggle in the heats. It’s hard. My whole body is aching. I scrape through in third place behind Hayle Ibrahimov and Isiah Koech. Massive relief. If that heat had been the final, I would’ve struggled. Big time.

  Galen makes it through in the second heat as one of the five-fastest times. I’m just glad that we’ve both qualified. I watch the replay of my heat on TV. I look visibly tired. I spend the next two days resting. Only now, with the heats safely negotiated, do I start thinking ahead to the final. I turn over the race in my head, asking myself what I have to do in order to win. Telling myself, ‘Damn, I want the same feeling I had in the 10,000 metres. I want to feel like that again. I want to make history.’

  Only a select few athletes have ever done the 10,000 and 5000 metres Olympic double. Kenenisa Bekele did it in Beijing in 2008. Lasse Viren did it in Munich in 1972 and again four years later in Montreal. Emil Zátopek, he did it in Helsinki in 1952. I want to put my name up there among the greats. For the next two days I don’t venture outside at all. Barry Fudge is busy making his by now regular food runs, bringing my meals up to my room. So I rest. And I think. And I wait.

  Three days after the heats, it’s the 5000 metres final.

  There are some fresh legs out there on the start line. Guys who haven’t competed in the 10,000 metres: Dejen Gebremeskel, Thomas Longosiwa, Bernard Lagat, Abdalaati Iguider, plus Koech and Ibrahimov. Seven guys on that start line have run faster personal bests than me. So, a lot of fresh legs. But I feel strong. I’d shown in Daegu that I can run a tough 10,000 metres race and then a few days later recover to win a 5000 race against the best guys in the world. And I’ve done so many races at the shorter distance that I know what to expect. It’s different with the 10,000 metres. If you think about a football match, where a game can be quite slow for the first sixty or seventy scoreless minutes, the pace suddenly picks up as the final whistle approaches and both teams are chasing a win. That’s how 10,000 races are run. You don’t want to go too hard at the start because you have a looooong way to go. The 5000 metres is nothing like that. There’s no gentle tempo at the start. As soon as that start gun goes, you’re off.

  I emerge onto the track and – wow! Somehow the crowd is even louder than the other night, if that’s possible. It’s like someone has just scored a winning goal in the World Cup Final. We are called to our marks. The crowd is going crazy and we haven’t even started racing yet. I look around at this sea of British flags. People bouncing up and down. The reception I get is mind-blowing. There are 80,000 people cheering me on. I feel the weight of the whole country behind me, willing me to win.

  It is 7.30 p.m. on a beautiful August evening and I am about to make history.

  The pressure is off for me tonight. I’ve already got one Olympic gold medal in the bag. Most athletes will only ever dream of winning Olympic gold and it meant so much to me. I had no intention of taking my foot off the gas, but being Olympic champion at the 10,000 metres has taken the edge off in terms of the pressure. There are no big bags of sugar weighing heavily on my shoulders this evening.

  The first five laps are relatively slow – a relaxed 77 seconds a lap. Then Gebremeskel, one of my main rivals for the title, pushes to the front and begins picking up the pace, doing 60-second laps. This is a big surprise. I’d reckoned on Gebremeskel kicking on more towards the end of the race, so why has he gone now, so early? Maybe he’s hoping to burn me out. Maybe he thinks that I’m still feeling the effects of the 10,000 metres. In years gone by, I might have struggled. But I’ve done the miles. I’ve given it all in training. I have spent the past year waking up each day and asking myself: ‘What more do I need to do? Do I have the speed? Do I have the endurance? What about my mental preparation? What else is there?’ Now, in front of massed ranks of flag-waving Brits, everything is coming together.

  With 1 kilometre to go, I close in on Gebremeskel. Then I surge past him. Then the bell rings.

  Then I hit hard.

  That last lap is absolutely fearsome. I go for it. I don’t let up. As I get to the 200 mark, the noise from the crowd swells. I can’t hear a thing. The ground is trembling. It feels like I’m running into a wall of noise.

  I dig. I keep going. I dig some more. And I cross the line in first place. For the second time in seven days I can’t believe I’ve won. I have just run the most painful race of my life. And now I’m a double Olympic champion.

  Suddenly, every sacrifice I’ve ever had to make seems worth it: being away from my family, locked up in a small room, the loneliness of training at high altitude, the tiredness – always the tiredness. Some days I’d be so exhausted that I’d have to resort to mind tricks in order to rack up the required number of miles. I’d tell myself, ‘I’m only doing 6 miles today.’ Then I’d run that distance in one direction, stop, think, ‘Well, how am I going to get home now?’ And I’d have to run the 6 miles back.

  There are no short-cuts to success. I have been striving towards this moment for such a very long time. In the wake of the World Championships in Daegu some people made it sound like I’d come out of nowhere. They didn’t take into account the years and years of running behind that victory, of building up that base of mileage. Winning a gold medal in a track event isn’t something that takes one or two years of graft. It takes ten or even fifteen years of hard work. I have grafted and grafted to get here.

  Galen comes home in seventh place, but he already has a silver medal in his pocket. He’s young. He’s knocking on the door. All he needs to do is get that little bit stronger and then there’s no limit to what he can achieve. There’s no doubt in my mind that Galen has what it takes to be a future World and Olympic champion. It’s a case of when, not if. And when Galen does cross that finish line in first place, I’ll be delighted for him.

  The celebrations continue. After winning the 200 metres, my friend Usain Bolt celebrated by dropping to the track and busting out some press-ups. Now I lie on my back and start doing crunches. Later on the same night, Usain goes one better when Jamaica wins the 4 × 100 metres men’s relay and uses the relay baton to do the Mobot. At the end of the night we’re left standing on the victory rostrum with our gold medals round our necks, the entire crowd having sung ‘God Save the Queen’, when out of nowhere we start doing each other’s moves. We hadn’t planned it at all. We just did it. It was one of those spur-of-the-moment things. Me standing there in the lightning-bolt pose, Usain with his hands on top of his head forming an ‘M’. I know Usain from way back. We’ve had fun times together. When I was getting married, he sent me a video message that was played at my wedding. ‘Mo, don’t do it! Don’t get married!’ Usain pretends to plead. Then he turns on the smile and says, ‘I’m only joking, man. Congratulations!’

  Alan Watkinson was there to watch me win both races. He’d put in for loads of events through the public ballot system, but the only event he secured tickets to was, coincidentally, the 10,000 metres. A friend got him tickets for the 5000. I only had two tickets for the final – the standard allocation for athletes competing in the Olympic Games – so I wasn’t able to get Alan one. Otherwise I would’ve sorted Alan out myself. After the Olympics he told me that he’d been screaming his head off during each lap. When the race was finally over, he sat down and cried. He didn’t enjoy watching the race. At least, not until the home straight. He enjoyed it a bit more after that.

  Someone asked me after the race how it felt to be a double Olympic champion.

  ‘Those two medals are for my girls,’ I said. ‘They can have one eac
h.’

  15

  TWIN REWARDS

  ALTHOUGH I was drained after the emotional high of London, I still had one more track race left to compete in after the Olympics, a Diamond League meeting in Birmingham at the end of August. I was booked to travel up there on the Friday before the competition. At 1.30 on Friday morning, Tania’s waters broke. It was like a water balloon erupting. I snapped out of my sleep and sat up. There was water everywhere – all over the bed. I looked quizzically at Tania.

  ‘What does this mean?’ I asked.

  Tania said, ‘I’m going into labour.’

  ‘Are you sure?’

  Tania nodded. ‘One hundred per cent.’

  That was the trigger. As soon as Tania said those words, I bolted out of bed and leapt into action, rushing into Rhianna’s bedroom to wake her up. She didn’t want to get out of bed at first. ‘Babies are on the way!’ I said. Then Rhianna leapt out of bed and the three of us rushed madly about the house, throwing stuff into bags. It was pandemonium. I got Tania into the car and hammered it down to Queen Charlotte’s & Chelsea Hospital on Du Cane Road in Hammersmith. At any other time of the day it takes thirty minutes to drive from our home in Teddington to the hospital due to traffic, but at that early hour the roads were dead and I managed to get us to the hospital in fifteen minutes flat. Dr Kumar, who had looked after Tania throughout the Olympics, took one look at Tania and said, ‘You’re already 9 centimetres. These babies are coming out now.’

  Both babies were in the breech position, which meant their heads were facing upwards. It’s too dangerous to deliver twins that way, so the doctor had to perform an emergency C-section. Tania had wanted to deliver naturally, but with the babies in the breech position we had no choice. As the father, I wanted to be there with Tania for the birth. I cleaned up and put on some hospital scrubs. Then we rushed into the operating theatre. Tania was given gas and air to lessen the pain from the contractions. I was nervous and excited at the same time. I’d never been through anything like this before. It was nerve-racking, being there for the birth. It’s something that you don’t have any control over. I was probably more nervous at that moment than I’ve ever been in my life. Meanwhile Rhianna was waiting in the room next door, since only one person was allowed in the operating theatre at any time. Before the epidural we asked the doctor, ‘Where’s Rhianna?’

  ‘She’s pacing up and down the corridor like an anxious father,’ Dr Kumar replied.

  I could see that Tania was in a lot of pain and I did my best to keep her calm, talking to her and holding her hand. They gave Tania an epidural. I think she was more scared of the epidural than anything else, because of all the horror stories you hear about it.

  I wanted to know what was going on all the time. I was asking Dr Kumar lots of questions about this and that. Once Tania confirmed she had no feeling left in her stomach, Dr Kumar looked up at me and said, ‘Are you ready to see some babies, Mo?’

  ‘Yeah, yeah, yeah!’ I replied excitedly. ‘I’m ready!’

  I looked on as they performed the C-section. It was totally gross but fascinating at the same time, watching them cut Tania’s stomach open and fold it back. Dr Kumar reached in with both hands and pulled the first baby out. When I saw my daughter I almost fell to bits. We’d already decided as parents that the first baby to come out would be named Aisha, after my mum. As they took Aisha over to get weighed, I kept repeating, ‘My daughter, my daughter, my daughter!’ I started taking pictures of Aisha. I was using a camera even though typically you’re not allowed to take pictures in the operating theatre. This is something I do a lot of: taking pictures of my family, for the simple reason that there are so few shots from my own childhood. I want to be able to look back when I’m older and remember all those moments we’ve shared as a family.

  I was still coming to terms with seeing Aisha for the first time when, two minutes after Aisha had been born, Dr Kumar said, ‘Mo, come back over here! The second baby’s about to come out.’

  I quickly rushed back over to Tania and watched Amani being pulled out. I was falling to bits by this point. I cradled the twins and talked to them. I thanked Dr Kumar. He’d looked after Tania while I was competing in London, which meant I didn’t have to worry about her. I knew Tania was in safe hands. Although Aisha and Amani had been born six weeks early, they were both healthy babies. One by one I brought them over to Tania so they could see their mum. I was bouncing off the walls. In all my life, I’d never been that happy. Everything came together for me in that one moment. Within minutes of the babies being born we were carted back into the waiting room. Rhianna was there. When she set eyes on her sisters, she almost burst into tears with happiness. She held the babies. That was an emotional time for me. The whole family together for the very first time. It was beautiful. We felt such a unit, the five of us.

  Looking back, I was lucky to be there at all. If the twins had been born a day earlier, I would have been stuck in traffic in central London doing media appearances. A day later, I would have been up in Birmingham.

  At the end of it all, I returned home with Rhianna. Tania had to stay at the hospital to get some sleep and recover. I’d been up all night. We all had – none of us had slept for twenty-four hours. But I didn’t feel tired at all. I was on the biggest high, thinking about the girls. I tried to get some sleep but I simply couldn’t switch off. Every half hour I called and texted Tania, asking her to send me pictures of the girls, checking on how she and the twins were doing, were they sleeping, and so on. Later on in the day I finally got some sleep. That evening I travelled up to Birmingham for the race. No one in the media knew about the twins at that point. Before competing I always take part in a press conference. So there I was, sitting in this room, fielding the usual questions about my performances, the Olympic medals and my expectations for the race, when about halfway through the conference one reporter, knowing that the twins were due imminently, asked how Tania was doing.

  ‘Yeah, she’s fine,’ I replied casually. ‘She had the twins last night, actually.’

  I hadn’t planned on mentioning it; it just sort of slipped out. For the rest of the conference, every question was about the twins. They were a day old and they were already big news!

  As every loyal fan should, I took the girls along to their first football match about two weeks after they were born, following an invitation from Ivan Gazidis. I didn’t want to miss the opportunity, as I so rarely have the chance to attend a live match at the Emirates. We ended up bringing the twins along with us. Arsène Wenger came up to the director’s box before the match. He immediately warmed to Aisha and Amani. In fact he ended up cradling one of the twins in his arms. Seeing Arsène Wenger cradling my daughter made my day. What else do you need to say about that? It’s Wenger.

  Three weeks after the Olympics we had another big milestone: our first fundraising ball for the Foundation. It was great timing for us. Interest in the Foundation and the fundraiser exploded after the Olympics, after I mentioned in my interview after the 5000 metres final that we were holding a Foundation ball and tables were still on sale to the general public. At that moment in time the venue we’d chosen, the Grosvenor House Hotel in central London, had a capacity of up to a thousand people. Before mentioning the fundraiser live on air, we had about four hundred tickets still up for grabs. After the post-race interview, the website crashed – there were so many people trying to buy tickets. We probably could have sold that room three times over. Everyone made it a truly special evening. Usain Bolt came along, which was a huge boost for the Foundation’s profile. Sir Steve Redgrave attended. Phillip Schofield was there, along with Jamie and Louise Redknapp, Ugo Monye, the England rugby player, Colin Jackson and Christine Ohuruogu. We held an auction and ended up raising over £200,000 for the Foundation. The biggest lot of the night was Usain’s running spikes. To begin with they were on silent auction and the highest bidder was £11,000. Then someone suggested putting the spikes on live auction, with Usain himself acting a
s the auctioneer. Brilliant. Usain did a great job, really getting into the role and bringing the value up to £36,000. It was a great night for the Foundation. The money that we raised that night has gone towards building a brand-new orphanage in Hargeisa – the same city where we’d originally visited the orphanage and seen the appalling conditions that kids were living in, and which had inspired us to set up the charity in the first place.

  We stayed in Teddington for a couple of months after the Games. The last race of my season was a two-mile road race at the Great North CityGames. It’s a sort of tradition for me to end my season here. Going into that race I was not in the best shape, having been busy with the twins and having hardly trained post-Olympics. Throughout the whole race my chest was burning. Like a lifetime smoker going for a run. That’s what it felt like. I could have eased off the gas and settled for second or third, but having just had the season I’d had, and being a double Olympic champion, I wanted to end my season on a high and make the crowd happy. Somehow I managed to dig deep. I pulled out all the stops and came home with a win. The following day five of Team GB’s Olympic and Paralympic champions fired the starting pistol for the Great North Run: me, Greg Rutherford, boxer Nicola Adams, rower Kat Copeland and swimmer Ellie Simmonds, who won gold in the 400 metres freestyle and the 200 metres individual medley at the Paralympics. We were high-fiving forty thousand-odd people as they crossed the start line. That was it for me: the curtain call for my season.